Poet Victor Neuburg was once turned into a camel by Aleister Crowley
(like the man in the Python sketch, he got better). Oxygen House's new
Crowley play, too, is something of a horse designed by a committee: the
whole is less than the sum of its parts. Writer Grant Morrison is preoccupied
with the early twentieth-century breakdown of the old intellectual orders.
Neuburg, though, cannot deflate the poetic excesses of Crowley – he is
too ineffectual to work as a central character. The play is technically
ravishing and filled with sonorous pronouncements, but some self-deprecating
humour would not go amiss.